The YEC enterprise and grooming conspiracy theorists

Faith & Science Conversation
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Please explain then how it is that Satan is the one who whips up a wind storm that kills Jobs children in Job ch 1?

18While he was still speaking, another messenger came and reported: “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house, 19when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on the young people and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you!

I find it a really difficult theological position to claim that Satan, a creature who is (even by your own world views claims) more than 6,000 years old, unable to learn science both faster and more intelligently than any human?

Add to the above youre confusing divine authority and power with God allowing Satan to have control of things like the weather. Satan is only allowed to have power to control things like the weather if God allows it. Here in Job 1, we clearly find an example of God doing just that…allowing Satan to control lightning and the wind.

Another example is found the Gospels when Satan took upon himself the form of an angel tempting christ. They did not walk to those places in that narrative, Satan was given the power to physically take Christ there (the roof of the temple being one of the spots he took christ).

This is an example of a person who recognises huge theological conflicts with their world view and then simply twists biblical text to fit their error in order to ensure the sqfety of world view. Philosophically, this is foolish and the conflict here is a major probpem for me.

I do not agree with your world view Christy because of massive philosophical stuffups like this…it becomes untennable.

If you would fix these problems and present a consistent and sound philosophical position, and then align that with the science, you would win me over…but honestly, this is a mess…

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Interesting to consider. I also ran this idea of Satan by a friend who also referenced Job. That argument falls a little flat to me as I consider the genre of Job to be that of a thought experiment or drama rather than a historical rendering, even if based on a historical figure. The playing of the conversation in heaven, the lack of concern at wiping out Job’s family (is that consistent with the God you worship?), the recording of Job’s, his friend’s, and God.s conversation, all point to a morality play of sorts, not a historical rendering. And as such, Satan here is a character, and his actions are created to move the story forward, not to express the nature of Satan. Of course, in that culture, everything- earthquakes, fires, storms and so forth were considered to be inseperatable from the actions of God or the gods.

The example of Satan and Jesus is a bit more problematic to explain away, but not that difficult. As it says in the first verse of the story: ‘4 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a] by the devil.”
This took place in the desert, and ended in the desert, and has all the hallmarks as being a vision, as people went to the desert and had visions. And, as the text says, he was taken to the wilderness to be temped, not that he was taken to the Temple or the mountaintop to be tempted, with the illusion of change of position coming within the temptation by the devil, not within the physical reality of Jesus’s trip to the desert. To say otherwise would give the devil physical control of Jesus’s physical condition and actions. Why would the devil not then just give Jesus a little shove off the roof of the temple and be done with it?
This type of imagery is often used in the Bible when describing dreams and visions, Again, perhaps it is a fundamental difference in how we read the Bible, and is not a gap that can be bridged.

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Job is a piece of ancient literature, it is not explaining meterology. I don’t think Job records a historical event, it’s a theological drama.

“Another example” of what? An angel appearing in a physical form is not at all related to an angel mastering all the knowlege of the centuries or an angel “having control of things like weather.” Just because the narrative doesn’t explicitly say “they walked” doesn’t mean Satan teleported people. The whole thing was probably some kind of vision anyway.

No, it’s an example of preferring interpretations that make sense based on other things I know. I don’t feel obligated to twist everything I know so it fits into some set of inflexible Bible interpretations as some sort of proof of my faith or wisdom. We aren’t the same.

This has to do to with epistemology and hermeneutics. And yes, I already told you we had no common ground, and I’m not interested in making my views fit your hermeneutics and epistemology, because I reject your givens. You can’t get to my understanding with your presuppositions.

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Curious… I am aware of this view… but saying you believe this only seems to reinforce Adam’s underlying belief

This was a breathtaking admission. But it is probably why I’ve noticed more often an acceptance of an eternal universe around here.

I’d rather not make any digs, but I have to say I don’t see how a post-modernist can make a super far reaching claim like this. It makes me very uncomfortable when someone says the Bible and science are operating in seperate domains. Either those domains overlap or you are literally going to fall off the edge of one map or the other.

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HIs underlying belief that we have completely incompatible perspectives and approaches to the Bible and mine is unacceptable to him? Yeah, I know. That’s been my point. I’m not going to be able to “convince” him of anything or “explain” my perspective in a way he finds compelling because we fundamentally do not share the same approach to Scripture interpretation in particular and knowledge in general.

I’m speaking of domains of discourse, not domains of reality. If you want two disciplines to be in conversation, they need to share a discourse domain. We do have domains of discourse related to some intersections of faith and science, like the application of Christian ethics to technology use or how the biblical mandate to steward creation motivates people to participate in ecological justice initiatives informed by ecology and climate science or how understanding of stochastic processes related to divine sovereignty.

What we should not do is cut and paste Bible verses into psychology or biology discussions as if their discourse domains use the same vocabulary and concepts. They don’t. The way the Bible talks about human spiritual flourishing should not be placed “over” the way psychology or biology talks about human flourishing, they should be placed alongside each other. Both can be used to inform our views of reality, but that doesn’t make them automatically conversant with each other. We have to create new discourse domains of intersection, which is kind of the point of this forum.

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Wow! You still surprise me! I agree with this and can also appreciate the difficulty of the task and would also warn against oversimplification of the way in which psychology or biology intersect with the story of the Bible. Just because they may appear to be conversant, doesn’t necessarily mean they are or that they cannot be.

I remember trying to engage Adam about death before the fall, and I wish he would have pursued the conversation with me.

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One of these days, I need to sit down and spend some time looking at the analogical use of language

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21 posts were merged into an existing topic: Theology questions Adam wants ECs to answer

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Theology questions Adam wants ECs to answer

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I just went back and read the OP four times, trying to convince myself it was partisan – and failed.

Data that point to a partisan divide on some topic does not make discussion of that topic a matter of politics.

You did notice that the OP ends with some questions, right?

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I couldn’t help but laugh here because the argument being made is one that forty years ago was decried by conservatives as a liberal fallacy: “debate both sides” was justifiably seen as an effort to drag in irrational arguments justifying them as a way to achieve “balance”.

This illustrates another of what was once regarded as a liberal fallacy: defining an argument in terms that purposely exclude any but two views.
This isn’t a matter of “both sides”, it’s a matter of at least four, possibly five sides. Defining it as YEC v TE is a rhetorical device meant to exclude anything not covered in the YEC talking points . . . and its employment merely points to validity in the ideas of the OP.

Except that artificially restricting it to just two views as selected by one party is actually about excluding educated choice.

While you insist on excluding the millennia of belief in an ancient Earth and more ancient universe.

Nor is the theological position of the Bible one that teaches that the Earth is young. Indeed, there are no biblical arguments in favor of that!

But you’re the only one saying that – and you’ve been corrected in it several times.

That statement is not consistent with what the Bible itself says; believing it requires maintaining that Jesus lied and Paul was in error.

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That is an extreme oversimplification! Selfishness can’t class as a personality disorder because all such disorders have different spectra of symptoms, one of which might be selfishness. An interesting illustration can be made with Tolkien’s character Gollum: there a huge difference between having a favorite piece of jewelry one wants to keep and having a “precious” one is willing to kill in order to keep or regain.

But that’s a false dichotomy. I’ve worked with people who have violated moral standards not because they chose to ignore those standards but because prior mental trauma left them not in control of their own behavior – not as in justifying immoral behavior but as in opposing it with all their will even as their bodies engaged in said behavior, effectively becoming passengers in their own bodies with the ability to observe but not change course.
And when brain scans of different types can actually show physical differences in brains of people in such straits, dismissing it as “not a health battle” is just badly uninformed.

I think it was an article in Christianity Today this last year that referred to this as a modern type of gnosticism.

A psychologist I knew stated one day that out of ten people you meet on the street, four are fighting mental health problems . . . and half of the rest have given up fighting.

Given he had multiple PhD-level degrees, I don’t think it was just him having a cynical day; either way it’s a frightening thought/observation.

Yeah. My first thought was about PTSD flashbacks; I can’t think of anything related anywhere in the scriptures.

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A friend the year before last, going through some serious issues, one day said to me, “I know I’m probably wrong, but I just don’t have the energy to think about it”.

Thanks to what I’ve been dealing with for the last two years, I can now understand that concept.

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They are in different domains in a very important sense because science is “view from below” by necessity and cannot be otherwise, while the Bible endeavors to communicate the view from above.
They’re also in different domains because they operate with different definitions of truth, and that not just because of the difference between VFA and VFB; science is propositional in nature whereas the scriptures quite frequently are not – parable, allegory, temple dedication, royal chronicle, teaching by contradiction, and more have very little overlap with propositional assertions [my favorite example, as people here probably already know, being how Jesus so frequently asserted His identity as being YHWH without ever quite stating it as a proposition].

Excellent clarification!

One of these days I have to revisit it. That was a topic that a number of my grad school professors were very uncomfortable with despite how important it is, some of them because it borders on the topic of the limitation of human language in the first place for describing anything transcendental.

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Is it just me, or does anyone else think this discussion has drifted way off topic?

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how can it drift offtopic…the topic is that YEC are mental case conspiracy theorists who are indoctrinating unsuspecting individuals with lies.

Everything i have said above is addressing that false claim.I am not the one who decided to introduce a question with such a broad range of ontopic responses…whoever posted the question should have thought more carefully before posting it in the first place!

Let me add, the reason why i have generally have long answers in posts on forums is because i like to cross link my theology…its not one of “sliced and diced” unrelated snippets from all over the place that are in constant conflict.

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Uh, by getting into esoteric arguments about whether or not satan can create things, or how much he knows about science?

Therein lies the problem, because that is a recipe for drifting off topic.

To be fair, Adam, some of the points that you make do have some merit, but you do need to remain focused. You may think you’re viewing theology as an integrated whole, but to the rest of us, your arguments come across as disjointed and rambling—a hodgepodge of theological claims whose relevance to the topic at hand and even to each other is unclear at best. It sounds more like you’re just trying to throw as much as possible at the wall in the hope of finding something that sticks than anything else. Or like you believe that you can win an argument by shouting and throwing accusations around.

I’m not saying this to attack you or anything here, I’m saying this to try to help you. If you want people to take you seriously—especially scientifically educated people—one of the most important things you need is clear communication. You can’t expect people to understand you properly, let alone agree with you, if your posts aren’t clear, focused, coherent, and straight to the point.

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I think we’re still being shown examples of why the OP asked useful questions.

For example–

Exactly – though you’re more polite where I would tend to be blunt, but then I have a hard time thinking about YECism due to all the people I knew in my university days who abandoned their faith because they followed the YEC logic just as Ehrman did, and while I managed to help a few through the crisis I can’t help but wonder if I could have helped more.

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Sometimes an image can contain more than one picture. Or how some images trick the eye into seeing one thing, when something else is there. Which one is real? Aquinas said something about how the Bible helps guide our understanding. That in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And when science looks at the world and sees an eternal universe, we can rest assured that science is seeing something incorrectly. For on this issue, there is no way around it.

Ironically, science may be looking at the world as I once looked at philosophy. That’d be something, and a real hard one to admit. How could we appear to be at the center of the universe, and that it can’t be confirmed or denied?

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16 posts were split to a new topic: The eternal universe, the Big Bang, Genesis 1